Some truths about fact

Jane Sullivan

Helen Garner wanders in and out of courts like a 'ghost'. Photo: Mark Chew

IT WAS a bracing start to the day, a sort of double espresso. David Shields, poster boy for the death of the novel and the end of copyright, was telling us to throw out the old, embrace the new, and save our lives with collage.

Straightforward fiction and memoir were nostalgia and retreat: ''Books that allow us just to escape existence are a staggering waste of time.'' Instead, he urged us to embrace a new form of non-fiction for the chaotic times we live in.

Shields is a best-selling author of books made up almost entirely of what other people have written. He stitches together what he calls ''shards'' to make a meaningful story. He deliberately doesn't attribute his quotes. When his nervous publisher persuaded him to put in an appendix of attributions, he urged his readers to tear it out.

It's enough to send Media Watch into a fit, and Shields says some people seem to think he's the Antichrist. But he was enthusiastically received by the crowd at the international NonfictioNow conference in Melbourne on November 23. Everyone was open to new ideas about literature, even when they threatened to turn the old ideas upside down.

This is the first time Australia has hosted the three-day NonfictioNow conference, which began in 2005 at the University of Iowa and this year was hosted by its non-fiction writing program and RMIT. I found it a great shot in the arm: a friendly and democratic gathering, a cross between an academic conference and a writers' festival, bristling with challenging ideas that never became bogged down in esoteric theory.

What was clear above all was that non-fiction, long looked down on as dry and factual, the poor cousin of fiction and poetry, has blossomed into a glorious, multifaceted, powerful and sometimes problematic genre. People frequently talked about electricity: this, it seems, is where the shock of the new has migrated.

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We heard about memoir, travel writing, long-form journalism, historical and political writing, science and social justice writing, lyrical and immersion non-fiction, designed to bring us into intimate contact with the writer's mind and the writer's world, which is also our world. In the words of non-fiction guru Robin Hemley: ''The reader has to hear the inimitable sound of the mind trying to figure something out.''

The biggest problem was what to call it. Creative non-poetry, memoirist Lee Kofman said. Non-fiction novels, novelist Judith Armstrong said. We should do away with the ''non'' and not define it negatively, writers' advocate Peter Bishop said.

Confusingly, non-fiction these days can actually include fiction, or at least blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. For some, this wasn't a problem so much as an opportunity. ''You can't trust facts,'' Icelandic writer Runar Helgi Vignisson said. ''Truth is completely different.'' Maria DiBattista suggested we follow Scott Fitzgerald's creed: he said he was a liar, but he never told lies that were valuable to himself, and he never lied to himself.

The day that opened with Shields' double espresso ended with Helen Garner's glass of fine red. In a talk on her books about legal cases, she told us honestly that she was struggling with her current project, but was cultivating the patience she had picked up from police detectives.

When the plaster ceiling of her office fell in while she was out procrastinating, she thought it might be a message: ''Dear Helen, You don't have to write this goddamned book. Signed, The Universe.'' But she keeps going - wandering in and out of the Supreme Court ''looking at other trials like a faithful and melancholy little ghost''.